Posted
by
samzenpus
on Wednesday April 28, 2010 @07:34PM
from the to-the-moon-with-you dept.

coondoggie writes "The FAA this week took a step closer to setting up a central hub for the development of key commercial space transportation technologies such as space launch and traffic management applications and setting orbital safety standards. The hub, known as the Center of Excellence for Commercial Space Transportation, would have a $1 million yearly budget and tie together universities, industry players, and the government for cost-sharing research and development. The FAA expects the center to be up and running this year."

WebTV is unfortunately still around, their users like to join IRC networks and act like uniform asshats and idiots. They jump in the room, ask a/s/l and then proceed to attempt to insult and curse everyone in the room. It is very similar to the way AOL users used to act. A normal WebTV user's comment will be something along the lines of "53/m/ny, lking 4 strt bi cyber, whisper me" and when told to go away they will use their stunningly high IQ of 80 to mock the person. They are a cancer of the int

This includes the nearly $10 million already paid out, plus the unknown amount of money in lost productivity of the various agencies, etc. who paid folks to attend meetings, plan stuff, gather requirements.

Maybe, but they had already slated Edwards AFB to be the American spaceport for commercial ventures. There's no mention of Edwards in the article nor the associated pages, so this may be yet another great waste of time, where one department didn't realize that they had set aside resources towards their goal already.

Edwards has been the defacto second space center in the US, with many space shuttle landings there. White Sands is a third US landing site, but from what I understand the dust made the shuttle rather messy.

Ya, $1 million won't buy enough land and the first construction trailer, much less a spaceport. $1 billion would be a good start, but that isn't even enough. It sounds like they're hoping to get other companies and universities to foot the bill. Good luck with that.

I'm reading this post, and I don't know what to even think of it. Edwards AFB as an American spaceport of choice?

I've heard somewhat recent reports about the commercial spaceport in Mojave, California; on Wallops Island, Virginia; Kodiak Island, Alaska; Burns Flat, Oklahoma; Cape Canavaral, Florida; and the big one that is being financed almost exclusively with state money in southern New Mexico. Vandenburg AFB, also in California, has been mentioned a few times although the military keeps things pretty w

Well you have to put your pinky up to your lips when demanding it. Then, of course your assistant will discretely inform you about diminished value of the dollar.... You know the rest of the story. It did result in a launch though. I guess that means it was successful.

This budget is probably to hire someone to coordinate the goodwill and efforts of people who are already funded by other means. 1 million means a 5-10 people team to do the work that no partner wants to do. That is not nothing. This is not the main gear, this is the grease that will make them turn. And sometimes, a big multi-billion project fails exactly for the lack of these small drops of grease.

From reading the Article I got the idea this was going to be another Federally mandated not for profit organization on the lines of http://www.itsa.org/ [itsa.org] ! They get a lot of their funding from the dues that members pay to have access to all the info they collect! Basically a clearing house for all the technical info for Space like ITSA is for highways!

$1 Million dollar budget? It's a nice gesture, but it seems pretty small for the responsibilities they're claiming this center to have. Seems more like a 'token' gesture made to *look* like they're doing something than taking real action to make things happen.
That said, I'd rather see them save that money and get out of the way altogether...

$1 Million dollar budget? It's a nice gesture, but it seems pretty small for the responsibilities they're claiming this center to have. Seems more like a 'token' gesture made to *look* like they're doing something than taking real action to make things happen.

Sounds like someone's nephew needed a job that didn't require him to actually do much other than pick up his paycheck.

$1 million will about cover office space & equipment and salaries for someone's nephew, his secretary, and the office manager for

They're just being efficient. One million dollars pays for exactly one CEO with nothing left over, but we all know that a CEO is a superhuman worker who can do hundreds of times what a normal worker can do, why else would they be paid so much? So this is really a cheap way of having an office staffed with hundreds without the hundreds.

$1 million is probably enough to handle 6 or so people working in an office. If they are there to facilitate the cross-pollination of ideas, writing and maintaining a couple hundred page piece of FAA regulations, and another document to explain how to manage the airspace involved, that's probably the right amount of money to get started.

Let's see... it looks like they will use an existing structure, probably part of either NASA's donation or a universities. Researchers will probably be from universities and NASA working on some kind of team with someone from the FAA either overseeing the whole operation or having significant input.

Here is one part I just wonder about -

3.3 CRITERION 3: THE ABILITY OF THE APPLICANT TO PROVIDELEADERSHIP IN MAKING NATIONAL AND REGIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS TOTHE SOLUTION OF LONG-RANGE AND IMMEDIATE AIR TRANSPORTATIONPROBLEMS.The applicant must demonstrate the following: Significant experience with industry and/or government agencies related tocommercial space transportation. A proposed plan might include the establishment ofan advisory board comprised of leaders in the field and written commitments fromtheir organizations to be actively engaged in the COE.
High standing within the national and international arena of commercial spacetransportation research as evidenced by presentations at national and internationalconferences, publications in popular and peer-reviewed periodicals, etc.
Evidence of ability to obtain matching funds and potential sources, i.e. letters ofcommitment.
If the applicant proposes as a member of a team of universities, it must provide acomprehensive strategic management plan. This plan should articulate proposedmanagement and oversight of fiscal and technical activities, and detail how theuniversities will coordinate research efforts, how research teams will be selected andevaluated, and how the costs of administering the Center will be apportioned andfunded.

It seems to me, it should be pronounced "punked"First it's announced that the shuttle is retiring. Then it's announced, "commercial spaceport".The same people involved in the shuttle (and support systems) are now involved in the commercial aspects.Sure doesn't sound like Virgin Galactic to me. What is replacing the shuttle? When will it be operational?1 million $ buys how many politicians? Who's doing the investment portfolio, Goldman-Sachs?This really sounds bogus. When this too fails, will the taxpayers b

Defense Contractor: "Why hello! My name is John and I work for Big Defense Contractor. Who might you be?"CECST Employee: "My name is Mike."Defense Contractor: "Sorry, Mike, I didn't catch where you work..."CECST Employee: "In CECST"

I understood it as using 1M to gather up groups (unis and such) to gather together and use the joint gathered funding to build the place and get it running.
So yeah, 1M to gather groups together to work on it MIGHT maybe. Get 2 Big Unis with some clout. Or 4 or 5 smaller Unis together to help. But still 1M in comparison to the Ivy League Schools that might actually have some powers to make it happens to mean little to nothing.

I understood it as using 1M to gather up groups (unis and such) to gather together and use the joint gathered funding to build the place and get it running.

Pretty much the impression I had, though I ask "build what place"? From what they describe in the article, they can just rent some office space, or set up a few "temporary" office trailers around existing FAA offices if they don't have room. It sounds like gathering the research groups together is most of all the actual work they'll be doing, acting as

A web page with a form. One poor nerd to sit in a dimly lit cubicle feebly attempting to respond to the 35,000 submitted forms per day, the IT infrastructure to support him (an exchange cluster, an AD + file&print server and bandwidth, a leased pair of IIS servers backed by a two-node MS-SQL Server server cluster). A filing cabinet he steals office supplies from every day.

A "consultant" in Bangalore that sets up said single web page ready to exploit with various viruses.

Yep, gotta handle all that space traffic. Yessiree Bob! No more waiting in line, no more congestion in the TSA security line, no more risk of getting bumped off your spaceflight. Yeah, times have changed, what with all the commercial space flight going on.

Honestly, and I'm certainly no libertarian, I don't want the FAA to have anything to do with space or commercial space travel AT ALL. OK, they do manage to keep the air travel in the US somewhat stable, but really they move so slowly and are so co-opted by they airlines they are supposed to regulate. Just ask anyone involved with trying to get the FAA to implement Direct and other flight path changes to improve on-time performance and fuel usage. Or anyone who has ever worked on any project to upgrade air

I, for my part, am a libertarian, but that is a little extreme. The FAA should definitely have nothing to do with what goes on above 100km, but there are some aviation concerns that the FAA might need to handle. Things like discarded stages falling on people's heads, rockets crashing into (or at least spraying exhaust onto, or destabilizing the flight path of) planes flying through the rocket's launch trajectory and spacecraft landing (most designs involve making the craft into an airplane). There should be no regulations in space, but things going up and down are still passing through everyone else's airspace.

I know you mean well and that's fine, but there is something you need to understand. All orbital spaceflights originating in the US have very strict requirements that a large portion of their initial launch trajectory ground traces over open ocean. This is done specifically so that you don't have rockets or fuel crashing down on your populace. Now, I don't know what kind of restrictions are being discussed by the FAA, but commercial launches already have to adhere to these guidelines (The Atlas

Too late. The FAA is already heavily involved with commercial space travel through the Office of Commercial Space Transportation [wikipedia.org]. They've been doing this since 1984 under the Reagan administration, although this particular commercial spaceflight office has jumped around between several different agencies before finally getting put under the head administrator of the FAA. The FAA-AST head reports directly to the chief administrator of the FAA, who in turn reports directly to the President. That is a rath

Yeah, because safety and quality are paramount to Chinese ideals? If you don't know what I mean, search for a couple YouTube Chinese automobile crash test videos.

Turns out, safety is profitable when the people who use your product are concerned about whether or not they'll die. Something tells me that regardless of peoples' ideas about how the FAA handles themselves with the commercial carriers in the US, they're keeping the skies as safe as necessary. When was the last time you had an aircraft tire crash t

The FAA is completely different, though, in that it deals with air travel. It is now deciding that you have to deal with it when you decide to go into space? If I launched my spacecraft from Iceland, France, Japan, or pretty much anyplace else, I'd not have to deal with any of it.

While other countries have their issues, it seems as if the U.S. can't help but create miles of needless paperwork and agencies to control everything that they can. Now they are trying to control access to space. Just moving y

You appear to be unaware that many other industrialized nations have their own version of the FAA and regulatory oversight also exists at the international level. From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_aviation#Regulation_and_safety):

Most countries have authorities that oversee all civil aviation, including general aviation, adhering to the standardized codes of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). Examples include the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in the United States, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) in Great Britain, the Luftfahrt-Bundesamt (LBA) in Germany, and Transport Canada in Canada.

...but then I realized that, while there were the predictable rants to the effect that government having anything to do with "commercial space flight" was a bad thing somehow, there were no observations on the irony of "commercial space flight" being reliant upon existing and massive taxpayer-funded infrastructure and the continued maintenance and improvement of same.

How "private" is a venture that depends upon the preexistence of a trillion dollar taxpayer investment to ensure that they don't get a free colonoscopy from a bolt or other bit of space debris that is traveling at 22,000 MPH??

I am still waiting for the "commercial space flight venture" that starts out in a truly "private" manner by building ground communications and tracking stations around the planet - to include a facility equivalent to the Air Force Space Command's tracking site at NORAD.

"Commercial space flight" is not so much a "venture" as it is a new and fascinating form of wealth transfer. Pat yourself on the back: If you have paid any Federal taxes in the last 50 years, you're helping somebody else explore the possibility of getting extremely wealthy through the use of the facilities you built.

How "private" is a venture that depends upon the preexistence of a trillion dollar taxpayer investment to ensure that they don't get a free colonoscopy from a bolt or other bit of space debris that is traveling at 22,000 MPH??

Roughly as private as a venture which depends on obtaining weather reports built using taxpayer investment. Or as private as a venture requiring the use of roads built using taxpayer investment. Etc... etc...

Roughly as private as a venture which depends on obtaining weather reports built using taxpayer investment. Or as private as a venture requiring the use of roads built using taxpayer investment. Etc... etc...

In other words, for reasons unknown, you wish to hold commercial space ventures to a standard no other business venture must meet. I hate to break it to you...It's part of that "public good" thing.

How much good is the public going to realize from these private space ventures? I somehow do not see the average American dropping $1x10e6 for a tourist ride.

If your response is that the private ventures will "someday" return something of value to the American people as a whole, then I would ask what is it? When will it arrive? How will these private ventures pay for the use of the American people's space facilities in the meantime?

To use the words that business uses to cut American jobs, ensuring that t

If you have paid any Federal taxes in the last 50 years, you're helping somebody else explore the possibility of getting extremely wealthy through the use of the facilities you built.

See, I look at it as:

If you have paid any Federal taxes in the last 50 years, you're helping invest in an industry that can open the door to incredible science, information, resources, and potential for the entire species.

That being said, this is one thing I actually like the idea of paying taxes towards. Well, this along with a standing army, a functioning power network, nice roads, etc...but that's all off topic. I guess what I am getting at is that this is helping a whole new industry blossom, just like cars blossomed in the early 1900's, and personal computers blossomed in the 1980's. That's something well worth investing in, in my opinion. Of course, your view may well (and certainly seems to) var

lolll...oh, I have no problem with this nation going into space; in fact, I figure that we either do that, or that we'll eventually collectively drown in the toxins so much American industry fled to China et al in order to freely produce.
I do, however, have a problem with this nation subsidizing a few people's drive for wealth. What kind of fees are we going to charge the emerging "private" space industry to recoup our investment in infrastructure, for instance?
People pay federal gas taxes, to use your

Well I don't know about any taxes in particular, but I do know that private space industry development will help move along COTS component R&D which will certainly benefit NASA, NOAA, and most civilian customers in terms of technology developments and in-house R&D money saved. I can't pretend to have the economic expertise to even start figuring whether this will lead to the subsidies paying for themselves or not, but it is certainly a start.

Take, for instance, the recent oil and ongoing oil spill in the gulf...in 2003 [cbsnews.com], an oil industry-friendly White House scrapped plans to make the oil companies tighten up their spill prevention act; a requirement to use the acoustic BOP was tossed because the oil industry argued that it was too expensive and "might not work anyway".

Now we have an oil spill that is going to cost...a lot...to clean up, perhaps because of a desire to avoid spending $500K. I find t

No joke.. We've dug...how deep? 5 miles? I'll be generous, 10 miles.. Cool we got 3,990 more to go.. approximately? Please, all you chicken littles... What are we gonna run out of next? Air? Oopsy daisy, you might have a point there. Meh, can't get that from space either... But there's plenty of that underground too actually..

So you think I'm wrong about this throwaway comment I made about why people might have reason to go into space. Fair enough, and maybe you're right; I'm a layman in the hard sciences, definitely not a rocket scientist or a geologist. But why the hostility? Why can't the goal of the conversation be progress rather than victory?

If an asteroid chock full of strategic and/or precious materials isn't enough for you, how about the next frontier for settlement? As the population of this planet has grown, we as a species have repeatedly opened new frontiers to expand into. Our planet is currently over-populated and needs a new frontier to expand into. Your choices are:

1) Build vertically and increase the density of our living space, but it doesn't address increased food & water consumption or increased heat generation (if you ha

Have you ever come across the fact that one small asteroid has more iron in it than all the iron mined in the history of mankind? That the nickel mine in Sudbury is mining the remains of a meteorite? Another fact that slipped your mind is that it will be a lot cheaper to build something in space from materials already out of the earths gravity well than it would be to boost the same thing into orbit from earth! Though you are perfectly correct, if all we plan to do is sit here and wait for the next, Megavo

I don't think that the AC poster really has thought through his comment very well. Nice comment there about the role meteors have played in terms of mining.... which offers some excellent thoughts on the topic.

One of the problems with heavy metals is that most of them have sunk into the center of the Earth over time, and that it is only rare exceptions.... usually due to volcanism or meteor landfalls mentioned above.... that you find deposits of the heavier elements in even modest quantities. Going to an

Dig deeper? Did you really read my post here? It is becoming increasingly more expensive and much more damaging to the environment to get much deeper. There certainly will reach a threshold that extracting minerals from space will be no just sort of cheaper but an order of magnitude cheaper than going down further. It sure isn't cheap to extract a pound of ore from a couple of kilometers underground, and takes a tremendous amount of capital to get that to happen. I've even heard that most mines expect

Okay, fine, no, I can't do those things, but that wasn't my point. My point was that the quantities of those things up there might make it commercially viable to invest the resources necessary to get personnel to near-Earth asteroids, or to orbit for processing.

You have no concept of the scale and energy needed to get things done in space either. The problem is really a fundamental factor of getting out of the basic gravity well that we call the Earth, as once you are in space life gets much, much easier. Sending up blueprints and data from the ground to space is trivial. Moving stuff around once you get into space is comparatively trivial. Seriously, do you know how much energy it takes to ship something from Austrialia to the UK? I would dare say that you c

Well, hell, if you're going to go there... Entire moons made of hydrocarbons [wikipedia.org]. 1E68 times the solar energy that falls on the Earth each day. More water, oxygen and all of the other basic essentials of life than exist on the surface of the Earth, times a billion. Diamonds the size of eggs. Eggs the size of diamonds. More real estate than all the world. And perhaps, Life.

Once you leave Earth orbit, you've spent half of the energy necessary to reach the next star - Proxima Centauri is closer than a round

This is somebody who clearly doesn't get it. What is being said is that from a pure energy standpoint, sending a kilo of "stuff" into space; in other words like leaving the gravity of the Earth and in a position to go somewhere else like the Moon, Mars, or one of the asteroids; and then ploping it back onto the ground where you got that "stuff" in the first place is actually cheaper to ship it to another star like Proxima Centauri than it is to ship it back to the Earth.

That idea is laughable. When we mine things on earth, we mostly use machines to do so - even though the conditions here are just about ideal for humans. Therefore, it is patently absurd to suggest that we would send humans into space to mine asteroids - asteroids without an atmosphere, exposed to vast quantities of radiation and most tellingingly of all, virtually no gravity. Why would we send a human to do a machines job?

And you laughed, I gather. Still doesn't make it an unrealistic. Humans after all do the control and repair on those machines on Earth.

Therefore, it is patently absurd to suggest that we would send humans into space to mine asteroids - asteroids without an atmosphere

Speaking of laughable, humans can't breath dirt either. But somehow, they manage to mine stuff underground. What's missing from your argument is the observation that humans can modify their environment extensively. So there's no need to try to breath vacuum when you can breath air in an environment you either made or brought with you.

Most people would understand that the word laughable carries the same meaning as farcical, comical, ridiculous, any number of descriptors which indicate that not only is the idea unrealistic, it is piteously so. Like believing that animals talk and have human emotions because Disney says so. If a kid believes that animals talk, it's cute and we think they are funny. If an adult believes it, we think they are to be pitied.

Humans after all do the control and repair on those machines on Earth.

Sure, and 100 years ago, humans dug up coal with a pick and a pony cart. But now, the

Entire cars can be produced on an assembly line with no human intervention.

I would love to see this supposed assembly line with my own eyes. I don't think it can be done, at least not without some humans working to maintain those machines which are making the cars. And who came up with these "machines" you are talking about? Is this some other machine?

I think not. Creative energies have to be expended, and these things are not happening on the Earth contrary to what other fantasies of watching Terminato

Entire cars can be produced on an assembly line with no human intervention.

I would love to see this supposed assembly line with my own eyes.

Well, google is you friend - if you are still not satisfied it would probably mean a plane ticket.

I don't think it can be done, at least not without some humans working to maintain those machines which are making the cars. And who came up with these "machines" you are talking about? Is this some other machine?

I think not. Creative energies have to be expended, and these things are not happening on the Earth contrary to what other fantasies of watching Terminator or The Matrix that you have been watching lately.

Even when it is possible to fully automate a process, often there are people involved either because it takes time to automate a process, the automation equipment is only going to be used occasionally so is not purchased, or because people happen to like hand-crafted products. There is a certain quality to hand crafted items that can't be made by a machine no matter how hard you try.

I'm not saying there is no place for an automated factory, but please, give a good example next time and try to explain why people no longer are needed in this universe in some fashion that makes sense before you spout off this drivel.

Good luck with that strawman. Try more kerosene, that usually helps.

I agree that when people start getting out into space there will be a high degree of automation for nearly everything that happens there. Labor shortages alone are going to require automated equipment, but I don't see an argument here that makes sense in terms of a complete prohibition of sending people into space, or that there will be zero need for having somebody on the ground on Phobos to take care of some machinery that can be repaired or dealt with easier there rather than having to have a team of several dozen try to come up with the programming necessary for the remote manipulator that is also broken down to repair that machine. Saying there is no need for people in space is just as nutty as saying everything will be done by hand and that we can walk to the Moon.

See previous post for the debunking of the 'humans are needed to repair the machines' myth.

See previous post for the debunking of the 'humans are needed to repair the machines' myth.

You haven't done that yet. Here's what you wrote:

Sure, and 100 years ago, humans dug up coal with a pick and a pony cart. But now, they use gigantic draglines and longline face machines to dig out the coal in an essentially automated fashion. Sure, humans occasionally interact with those machines to repair them - but not because it is infeasible to have a machine do the repairs, but because it doesn't (currently) make the most economic sense. Entire cars can be produced on an assembly line with no human intervention. So if it made economic sense we would certainly do the same for mining equipment. In the asteroid example if a machine broke down, we would send another to take it's place, or send another machine to fix it. We would never send a human - because for one that would be a crap job, a return to to the type of working conditions we haven't seen in the west since the industrial age, for two, humans are crap at undertaking tasks in space, our bodies aren't designed for it, and for three, the killer reason, it doesn't make economic sense.

This is your "debunking". Saying without even a shred of proof, that machine repair is "not infeasible". Second, there are no assembly lines that operate with no human intervention. Humans still maintain those assembly lines and hence, are "human intervention". Humans still have command authority over what that assembly line does, again more "human intervention".

This is your "debunking". Saying without even a shred of proof, that machine repair is "not infeasible". Second, there are no assembly lines that operate with no human intervention. Humans still maintain those assembly lines and hence, are "human intervention". Humans still have command authority over what that assembly line does, again more "human intervention".

You missed the point of the illustration, which is not that car assembly lines run unattended but that cars are built entirely by robots, without human intervention. The degree of automation is bound by economics, not technology. If robots can build a car then they can certainly repair a piece of mining equipment.

Look at it another way. We know from the get go that asteroid mining will struggle to be economically viable, mostly because any material which requires that much energy investment to transport

You missed the point of the illustration, which is not that car assembly lines run unattended but that cars are built entirely by robots, without human intervention. The degree of automation is bound by economics, not technology. If robots can build a car then they can certainly repair a piece of mining equipment.

The paragraph is incorrect since these lines operate with human intervention as I pointed out. Also building something is not comparable to repairing something. The key difference is that the production line has an extraordinary degree of control over the inputs. The materials and components are of exacting specifications. A repair job starts with a piece of broken equipment, possibly with past kludges or other inexact repairs and changes. You don't have control over what you get to repair or how it breaks.

I am struck in your post about how much you harp to the point of obsession on the limitations of the human body. If you can have self-repairing robots (or it is cost effective to send massive mining infrastructure when the old infrastructure breaks), then that's probably a technological environment in which you can engineer human bodies that can withstand the rigors of space. In other words, when we're doing mining and other things in space, we'll probably have the technology in place to obsolete that entir

This is probably the stupidest argument against exploring space I've ever seen, and it keeps being repeated like it's a valid statement. Guess what? There was nothing on Antarctica prior to 1905 either. That's when the first research station was built there. Private industry has been sending cruises with tourists for the last 60 years.

There are hundreds of thousands of destinations out there, just in our system alone. Only a tiny fraction has been explored and as far as anyone can tell, it's all raw resou

I don't get this one at all. Where in the solar system are you going that you live for a total of three seconds once you get there, and how do you get there in the first place? And you are saying that all places in the solar system other than on the Earth are this inhospitable? If most astronauts died three seconds after launch, there wouldn't be many folks who would be willing to make the trip in the first place. For many, they wouldn't have even cleared the launch

The big expense in space expeditions is the cost of sending everything up there. What we need is a place where we can start to manufacture things from the resources available, and that's not all that far off.

And who are you going to sell them to, in large enough numbers (or high enough per-unit prices) to pay back the trillions of dollars of up-front infrastructure investment?

Are you going to be able to get them down to Earth's surface for less than their weight in gold? If not, why would your customers on Earth buy goods they'll never use? More to the point, why should they buy expensive space-built stuff when they can get cheaper Earth-built stuff?

I'll be the first to admit that the cost of getting into orbit needs to drop substantially. That is really one of the major limiting factors for getting into space, where shipping up a 1-liter bottle of water costs $100k when it is delivered to one of the astronauts on board the ISS.

Unfortunately that is not something NASA has been actively trying to resolve either, except to drive that cost up. The folks appropriating money for this are more interested in the jobs for their states/congressional districts

what's the motivation...Who's gonna go, with what money...what makes you think we'll do space travel

Answer

Zero-G sex/ porn movies/ any deviant endeavor relating to the baser needs of humanity. There's money out there, lots of money. Whether the powers that be allow anyone (other than themselves) to go as well as remain is still questionable.